Of roommates and mess food

My last night in the Hostel in SASTRA Univ and a good time to reflect or rather look back on the four years in " a home away from home I guess !"

To begin with, before I can even begin in fact, I wanna thank my roommates ...
Suresh, Mouli and Suresh in the first year,
Santosh in the second year
and lastly and most importantly Jaga, who has put up with me for 2 years .. Thanks a bunch mates ...

"Sandipani Sadan" ..
no no .. this aint no sanskrit sloka to start off .. this is the name of my first year hostel...

Right ... the first year ... first time away from home .. everyone startin on an even keel ... No one knows too many ppl ... We were lucky actually .. A whole bunch of us from the same school .. Yet, like a gazillion others in the hostel, from all parts of the country ...

All the first week talk was obviously about who were gettin ragged and how .. Quite funny when we look back actually... Once the ragging phase died down, all the talk everywhere was about, you guessed it, Gals !! Oh come on.. dont act surprised .. It's a Boys' hostel for cryin out loud !!! And once the dust settled, there were the fights with the warden about permission to go home( yeah, you read right, we had to get permission to visit home !!)..Then came the tv fights, and boy were they the best .. We basically had only one tv in the hostel( for about 700 ppl) and were only allowed to watch on weekends... Tamils, Golts, Northies ... you get the point :)..And then there were the cricket tournaments, the cricket in the hallways, the football in the corridors, the UNO games, and of course, the studies !!!

The Holi bash(quite literally), and last, but certainly not the least, the fight with the warden which saw a guy actually pour piping hot milk on the warden's head !!!
At the end of it all, I ( I speak purely for myself here) was quite pleased to leave that hostel and get into a "senior" hostel, 'cause quite frankly, I had had enough...

I came about three days after the 3rd sem started and my friends had already picked out a room for me. There I was, standing in front of this wooden door early in the mornin, when the hostel was asleep. I opened the door and before me was this hole in the wall, a small space,7 foot by 10 foot, that was room no. 299, Ananda Vihar(AV) ! My first reaction :" Where's the rest of the room??" ... Well soon enough the morning bathroom rush started and then it was time for college. So anyway, I came back to the room in the evening and I met one of my seniors from school and he said, " You'll get an affinity towards AV." These exact same words, I can remember clearly. And of course, I remember thinking tht 3 years in this
place had finally gotten to him and tht he was all up there in his head !!! But guess what, he was right and I'm still here, almost 3 years later, sittin in AV, only in a different hole in the wall :)

Now, the third sem passed without much of an incident and then came the fourth sem, and that brought with it, the one thing that changed hostel life forever .. THE COMPUTER !!! And boy, what a change in hostel habits it brought about !! Time previously spent chatting and gossipping was now replaced by movies and of course FIFA !!! Hardly any work to do, the computer at our mercy .. need I say more !!!

Another year gone, and another hole in the wall.. room 378 this time and Jaga, my roomie ... Again, the computer, more ovies, more gaming and a whole lot more fun. This was also the time when our gang expanded from 3 rooms to a whole, round 6 !! Oh the good times... Another feature of the third year was the terrace. We were on the top floor and the staircase to the terrace was a stone's throw away from our room... Naturally, a lot of late night talks and star gazing followed... Thus passed the third year with yet more movies and games, and hardly anything productive done.

The final year.. By this time, AV was well and truly our domain, and being final years', naturally, the rule of the land came to us... THE GROUND FLOOR !! No more climbing stairs during tea time or in the mornin .. That was for "the juniors" to do :). AV 178 was my room this year and technically, it remained a single room almost all through the year. Jaga was offered an internship in Germany in the seventh sem and I had the room to myself. In the eighth sem, I was offered an internship in Mysore, and he had the room to himself.

The seventh sem was in many ways, the one semester that I would most remember my hostel life by. Apart from being in a single room for the first time in my life, and apart from the fact that I was, ahem, preparing for CAT, lots of things happened that changed a lot of things. I cant really explain cause I just cant really explain it. But the undoubted highlight of the sem was towards the end when the rain started... Just like the expression, when it rained, it poured !!! But unlike the expression, it didnt just pour, it poured and poured, and then poured some more. And just when we thought that it was over, it poured again !!! The common area in the center got flooded and the water threatened to overflow into our rooms. Add to this, power cuts of about 4 hours a day( close to 7 in the early part of the sem) and just like the rhyme " water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink", only, in our case, there was not a drop to use. It was raining cats and dogs but there was absolutely no water whatsoever in the taps in the bathrooms. As a result, we didnt have a bath when we wanted to, we had a bath when water came( and conveniently, lots of people didnt :) ). We didnt go when 'it' came. We went when water came. It was well, an experience, to say the least.

A quick word on the mess food. It was pretty much bearabl eapart form a few days when, well, I think that my shoe would've tasted better. Insects and flies were quite common in the sabzis and the kurmas. what did we do when we found insects in our food? Why, throw a tantrum and alert the warden of course. NOT ! We just picked it up, put it on the table and continued eating :) Shit happens !!

Now, I sit here, after 3 years 10 months and 15 days after my first night in hostel, and I'm wondering where these 3 years 10 and a half months have gone. Its been a learning experience to say the least and a wonderful one at that. But as with everything else in life, all good things must come to an end, and today or rather tonight marks the end of this chapter.

Goodnight. Godspeed and adios AV. Its been a pleasure.

P.S I have left out India's T20 world Cup win and the two editions of the IPL quite delibrately cause if I had indeed included the details of those, you would probably have to keep readin this post for a very very long time indeed. Maybe another post on them, who knows !!


Cheers

Another Season almost done

Another season of the BPL has almost climaxed and what a season it has been. A topsy turvy ride spanning not only the teams chasing the title but also the teams hoping to avoid the drop, and it isn't quite over yet. United have won the title with a game to spare but that's only half the story. The real story cooking up is at the foot of the table, where even West Brom, bottom for most of the season and seemingly quite doomed to life in the Championship, now have a lifeline. The final weekend promises to be one hell of a rollercoaster ride.
Congrats United on winning the title. Regardless of what anyone might say, it was you who won it, and not someone else who lost it.
Glory Glory Man United ...
More to come after the end of the BPL ..
Watch this space ....
Cheers

An ode to United

Here's a man who goes by the name Arunaldo..
True to his pen name, he is as fleet with his pen as Ronaldo is with the ball at his feet ...
So without much further ado,
I give to you ...

http://urstrulyarun.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-ode-to-man-utd.html


An ode to United ...
A must read for all United fans ...

Cheers

p.s By the writer's own high standards, this is still work in progress and should be called version 1.0 ..
For the rest of us, a treat !!!!

Crossie part 1

Crosswords ... Those black and white grids that appear on the newspaper everyday .. Those cerebral word games that only a few people even look at .. Or is it ??
Crosswords are a wonderful passtime and also equally importantly, a way to build up vocabularies .. All it needs is a little time, and oh yeah, a bit of lateral thinking ...
I am by no means an expert in solving crosswords.. I can safely say that I am half decent.. But thats beside the point ...
This is sort of a guide for starters to start solving crosswords and exercising those grey cells ;)

Well lets begin, shall we ??
Right ...
First of all, 2 terminologies that you should know ...

Crossie ... Simple enough .. stands for Crossword ...
Cruci ...this is short for Cruciverbalist, or a crossword setter ....

Now the typical crossword has a grid with certain squares blacked out ..
The idea of the backed out squares is that those are the excess squares that are not for our consideration ..
Next, some of the squares are numbered ... These indicate that the answers to the clues begin at that square ...
Now coming to the most important aspect of the crossie ..

THE CLUE


These are found to the left of the grid or below it and are primarily of two types ...

Across and Down

Now, the typical clue will be of this form :

1. The Language of the Britisher(7)

The clue basically has 3 parts :
The number ...
The clue itself ..
The no. of letters in the word ...

in the above clue, the clue's number is '1'
this denotes that the answer to the clue must be filled into the squares starting from the square numbered 1 ...

Next is the clue ... this is usually a sentence or a phrase that gives you the clue to the answer...

Finally the number in the bracket ..
this denotes the number of letters in the solution to the clue...

this is the basic overview of all that you need to .. well, to atleast look at the crossie next time you flip through a newspaper ;)

Clue solving strategies coming up shortly ..
Cheers